Luc-André Brunet: Forging Europe: Re-Thinking the Institutional Foundations of the European Coal and Steel Community

This presentation is based on the final chapter of Brunet’s book project, which traces industrial organisation in France from the establishment of the Vichy regime in 1940 to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) – the forerunner to today’s European Union (EU) – in 1952. Brunet began by summarising the narrative of the previous chapters of the book, which showed how institutions created by the Vichy government with a view to facilitating economic collaboration with Nazi Germany were maintained after the post-war French government, and became central pillars of the Monnet Plan, which oversaw the modernisation of French industry from 1946. He then focused on the central argument of his final chapter – namely that these institutions, known as Modernisation Committees, formed the institutional foundations for the ECSC. In so doing, he discussed France’s political economy and the country’s broader foreign policy in the early Cold War, as well as the more detailed institutional and individual continuities from the Monnet Plan to the ECSC.

Simon Macdonald: The Internment of British and Irish Expatriates in Paris during the French Revolutionary Terror

A programme of arrests in Paris during the French revolutionary Terror in 1793 targeted British and Irish expatriates. These internments resulted from wartime decrees aimed against foreigners in France who originated from enemy states. By contrast, before the Revolution, foreign residents in France — and Europe more widely — had tended to be left unmolested during wartime, even when their host country was at war with their country of origin. The 1793 arrests, therefore, highlighted the breakdown of old regime practices, and the development of new models of interstate conflict. Additionally, because this programme of arrests was a novel undertaking, the resulting archival data represented a particularly rich research resource for studying an expatriate population in eighteenth-century Europe.